Links for 2010-12-02

“New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and ProPublica, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalism non-profit, have formed a joint project to enhance the genre of “The Explainer,” a form of journalism that provides essential background knowledge to follow events and trends in the news.

The project aims to improve the art of explanation at ProPublica’s site and to share what is learned with the journalism community.”

“In America, no one wants to listen to self doubt. Also in America, our reporters don’t have a working knowledge of arithmetic, which underlies practically every topic commonly reported on the front page or the evening news. Somehow, I suspect the latter makes the former a lot easier.”

If you want an example of how screwed up our national political discourse is, this is it.

Short answer: No, though Emmy thinks we should try it anyway.

“Our Earth-based intuitions about the difficulty of travelling long distances break down badly in space. It’s tempting to think that just because Saturn, say, is nearly 4,000 times further away than the moon, it must be 4,000 times more difficult to reach. After all, on Earth it takes about 10 times as much work to go 10 kilometers as it does to go 1 kilometer. But in space, where there is no friction, this intuition is entirely wrong. In fact, in this essay I’ll show that with some important caveats the situation is far more favourable, and it doesn’t take all that much more energy to get to the outer planets than it does to get to low-Earth orbit.”